About Me

Sunday, January 12, 2014

First Impressions: Resident Evil 5

Continuing with my habit of playing games on my PS3 that were popular three or more years ago, I've spent the last weekend playing the 2009 video game, Resident Evil 5.Years ago when I first came into contact with the Resident Evil series, it was through the original Playstation game Resident Evil 2, wherein you played through the same story twice first as a rookie cop named Leon and a college student named Claire, who have overlapping stories and the first example of long-term planning I've come across in gaming - wherein if on your first play through you use up all the resources available in certain locations, there will be nothing left for you to use on your second time through the game as the other character.After playing my way through Resident Evil 2, I got a lot more interested in the zombie sub-genre of horror, and have enjoyed all of the movies as they've become available on DVD. I hadn't actually touched any of the other games in the series however, until this one.The pacing of Resident Evil 5 is quite different than that of 2, for starters the "zombies" are actually infected humans and are therefore much cleverer and faster than the majority of the creatures in the earlier game. I will happily admit I got stuck for a long time in the first stage of the game as I couldn't quite put together what the game designers wanted me to do and had to look for tips online to figure my way past.Otherwise the game is pretty fun, the setting is interesting and once I got a handle on the how the controls worked I began moving my way through the story at a pretty good clip. The scares are definitely there, and although the plot seems a little overly complicated for my taste, it's still a fun way to play a great horror story in a well-established series.